Israel's military acknowledged on Wednesday, for the first time, that its soldiers opened fire on the car in which five-year-old Hind Rajab was killed in Gaza City in January 2024, and said it has opened a criminal investigation into her death, CNN reported. The admission reverses more than two years of denials: the military had previously said a preliminary review found its forces were "not present near the vehicle or within firing range."
The Israel Defense Forces said the firing in the incident "raises a reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct," and that military police will also investigate the killing of two Palestine Red Crescent paramedics who were dispatched, with Israeli coordination, to rescue the girl and were themselves killed.
A death that became a symbol
Hind Rajab's final hours were documented in real time. On January 29, 2024, she and six relatives tried to flee fighting in Gaza City's Tel al-Hawa district; their car came under fire, killing her aunt, uncle and cousins. Trapped among the bodies, first her 15-year-old cousin Layan and then Hind herself called the Palestine Red Crescent, whose dispatchers stayed on the line with the terrified child for hours. "The tank is next to me," she told them in a recording released afterward. The ambulance sent to retrieve her was struck, killing paramedics Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun. Twelve days later, the bodies of Hind, her relatives and the two paramedics were found; investigations by news organizations and rights groups reported the car had been riddled with hundreds of bullets, and a forensic analysis commissioned by Al Jazeera concluded a tank had been positioned within tens of meters of the vehicle.
The recording of Hind's pleas traveled around the world, and her name became shorthand for the war's civilian toll: a Hollywood-backed film about her death, The Voice of Hind Rajab, won the Silver Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival.
What changed, and what did not
Wednesday's announcement came as part of what the military described as a broader review of alleged misconduct during the war, with criminal probes also opened into a March 2025 incident in Rafah in which 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers were killed. The military declined to open criminal investigations into several other high-profile cases reviewed in the same process.
The IDF did not say what its soldiers believed they were firing at, nor did it name any suspects. Criminal investigations by the military police can lead to courts-martial, but rights groups note that prosecutions of soldiers over Palestinian deaths have historically been rare.
'We do not trust the Israeli judiciary'
Hind's family rejected the military's process outright. "We do not trust the Israeli judiciary," her grandmother said, in comments carried by Al Jazeera, calling instead for an international investigation "to uncover the truth and hold all those responsible accountable." The Hind Rajab Foundation, a group founded in her name to pursue legal cases against Israeli soldiers abroad, called the probe "a charade meant to whitewash the culprits instead of convicting them."
UN human rights experts said as early as 2024 that the killings may amount to war crimes and that the absence of investigation could itself violate the right to life. For the family, and for the many who came to know a five-year-old's voice through a dispatcher's phone line, the question now is whether an internal military investigation, opened thirty months after her death, can deliver anything they would recognize as justice.
